HOT TOPICS:

At cookie-baking class, kids learn how Grandma did it -- maybe

By Maja Beckstrommbeckstrom@pioneerpress.com

Posted:
12/01/2012 05:30:38 PM CST

Updated:
12/01/2012 10:07:05 PM CST

Baked cookies are sugar sprinkled and festively packaged for delivery.

The best kitchen tip I received during a recent cookie-making class came from my 10-year-old son. He taught me how to set the timer on my smart phone. My back pocket would start vibrating, and I'd know it was time to check the sugar cookies.

On a recent Saturday morning, my son and I joined a dozen other adult-and-child pairs for a cooking class through St. Paul Community Education. We hoped to learn a few easy recipes and make cookies at home to give away as gifts at the holidays.

I'm not a skilled baker. I never learned from my Finnish grandmother how to make her impossibly thin and spicy ginger cookies. I'm more comfortable with the formless drop variety. So this class was perfect. Longtime instructor Laurel Severson would be teaching us eight types of cookies, including several chocolate chip varieties.

"Did you know that out of all the cookies made in the United States, more than half use chocolate chips?" Severson said to a group gathered in the kitchen classroom at Harding High School in St. Paul.

"This brings back memories of Home Ec," said one mom looking at the walls lined with ovens and counters. My son was impressed with the bulging 25-pound bag of flour on a table next to a box holding 7 1/2 dozen eggs. On the counter by the window, sticks of butter were stacked beside big canisters of baking powder, jugs of vanilla and food coloring and bags upon bags of chocolate chips.

Severson joked that she buys nothing in small quantities. She spent a career managing the dining rooms and cafeterias at 3M, thinks nothing of cooking a spaghetti dinner for 500 people and plans to teach a dozen cookie classes before Christmas through various metro community-education programs. This was her only adult-child class this season.

ROLLING-PIN ADVICE

Severson assumed we already knew how to wield a rolling pin and how to test if a cookie was done. So she offered only a few tips before sending us forth.

"Use glass measuring cups for liquids and plastic cups for dry," she said. She also brought a box of vintage cotton towels and suggested we pull the corner of one through a pant belt loop so we'd have somewhere to wipe our hands. (A great tip!)

My son and I started at the rolled cookie station, where Ziploc bags of dough waited on the counter. He started vigorously rolling, but the dough kept sticking to the rolling pin, even with a dusting of flour.

The mom next to us, Lena Gould of St. Paul, seemed to have no problem, so I asked for advice. She suggested rolling in one direction, not pressing hard back and forth. Her swift, light strokes reminded me of how my mother rolls out perfect piecrusts every time.

"We bake a lot at home," Gould explained. She was taking the class to spend time with her 3-year-old son, Atticus, who has to vie for attention at home with a 15-month-old sibling. Meanwhile, Atticus had massaged a wad of dough into an abstract shape and gleefully pointed at it, "I made a rabbit!"

My son decided to cut out stars. Only stars. He pressed down the cookie cutters very carefully, so the point of each star nestled into the angle of another.

"Look, Mom, I figured out a way to make less waste," he said. "When he laid them out in lines on the cookie sheet, it looked like a corner of an American flag.

We moved on to make "Almost Mrs. Field's" chocolate chip cookie, banana chocolate chip cookies, chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips, peanut butter balls and several others. My son used a mini ice-cream scoop to drop mounds of dough onto the sheet.

"They're always the same size," he said, delighted with the precision of his tool. "You don't get some super big and some super small." (Note to self: Get small ice-cream scoop cookie thing for Christmas stocking.)

He wasn't the only boy having fun.

"I love seeing all the boys here," said one mother, Charlotte Willis of St. Paul, who had brought her fifth-grade son and aspiring chef, Max.

All the adults in the class were women, but the kids were evenly split between girls and boys, ranging in age from 3 to 13. Eleanor Leary of St. Paul brought her nephew, Alvin Leary, for his seventh birthday, as she said, "a special Alvin-aunty thing.

When the first batches of cookies started coming out of the oven, Severson told us she once went to a bakery in San Francisco's Chinatown where defective fortune cookies were sold at a discount as "unfortunate" cookies.

"Today, any of your cookies that might be a little lopsided or a little broken, put them on this paper plate and we'll eat them," she said. "We'll call them our unfortunate cookies."

I also wanted to eat raw cookie dough but decided that is something you should do in the privacy of your own kitchen. I did sneak a taste while I was doing dishes with my back turned to the room. Shh. Don't tell.

Halfway through our three-hour class, a cookie sheet got wedged between the sides of an oven. No amount of yanking could dislodge it and it took several moms, a handful of pot holders and a hard whack with a big spoon to knock it free.

The crisis solidified our growing camaraderie. My son finished the morning making cookies in an assembly line with another boy. Adults chatted as we cleaned up.

"It's nice not to have the mess in my own kitchen," said mom Jen Fitch, who came with her 6-year-old daughter, Nora. "And we get so many cookies to take home!"

Severson divided the cookies onto sheets of parchment paper so everyone could take home an equal number, regardless of what we might have made. And each child took his or her own decorated cookies. So my son got his stars.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, my son proudly served his cookies to numerous relatives, who asked for seconds and thirds. He enjoyed feeling like he had contributed to the family celebration.

Next weekend, we'll pull out Severson's recipes and bake cookies in our own kitchen to give away. We're partial to the toffee and chocolate chip cookies, the chocolate mint cookies and rolled sugar cookies. I just wish Severson was doing the shopping.

Teach kids that holidays are about giving as well as receiving. Your child will walk out of one of these classes with something to wrap up and hand to a beloved someone. What will it be? A clay picture frame for Grandma? A case for Mom s smartphone? An ornament for the tree? Some classes are for kids only, and some are for an adult and child. For more options, check art and crafts stores and school district community-education listings.